The Monster Hash
The other day, I picked up that quintessential example of good journalism the Weekly World News to see this headline: “Five-Star Restaurant Uses Zombies As Waiters.” Like all of this unique tabloid’s stories, this particular article was hilariously over the top. I especially admired how it tried to sympathetically dispel voodoo stereotypes (that zombies are also cannibals) by quoting the restaurant manager as saying, “We’ve had to add a line to the menu assuring patrons that our servers will not eat them.”
Lest you think this story is pure fiction, I recently had a restaurant experience in which the servers really did seem to be zombies — or to be doing a remarkable imitation of them. The restaurant was a newly opened bistro in south Kansas City with some very real opening-month jitters, which makes me want to cut it a little — not a lot — of slack. A friend of mine had raved about this joint’s $10 Sunday brunch, which she claimed was abundant and pretty darn tasty.
It seemed too good to be true, so two friends and I went to investigate the matter. That’s when we encountered the zombies. The joint’s front door was open, so we walked in and stood there waiting for someone, anyone, to notice that we wanted a table. The place wasn’t terribly busy but clearly had experienced an early rush, because there wasn’t a clean table in the dining room.
After seven minutes, one of the pasty-faced zombies looked up and ushered us over to a crumb-strewn, water-splashed table. “Igor will be right with you,” she said, wandering off.
But Igor — well, he looked like an Igor anyway — never came anywhere near our table. He was too busy stumbling around, picking up water glasses from empty tables and setting them down again, loping toward the bar and grinning off into space. My friend Ned looked at his watch. “We’ve been at this table for eight minutes and Igor hasn’t acknowledged us. Should we flag him down or leave?”
I was fascinated to watch Igor do everything and nothing at once. He never looked in our direction. We got up to leave. No one noticed.
“Are we invisible?” I asked.
“No,” snapped Ned, “they’re just zombies.”
In the Weekly World News article, the owner of the “five-star restaurant” said he preferred zombie servers to “ordinary humans,” who bickered and squabbled. As a former bickering, squabbling waiter, I know that’s true. But really, a zombie before noon turns any meal into a horror story.
